It was 1997. Movies hadn’t been very interesting for awhile. Then a 27-year-old kid from Studio City blew our doors in.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” was not only a bold, compelling, character-based wowser; it wasn’t just a tantalizing, provocative piece about the porn business of the 1970s and ’80s and its practitioners’ sexy, coked-up,delusional and increasingly violence-plagued lives; it was a film about our San Fernando Valley, damn it, and for all of its studied vulgarity an undeniably fine work of art.

“You can either look at ‘Boogie Nights’ as another insulting film that depicts residents of the San Fernando Valley as amoral, drug-addled fools, or you can look at it as the best movie of the past three years,” was how I led my Oct. 17, 1997, L.A. Daily News review of the picture.

Perhaps the most ingenious thing local boy Anderson did with his all-genius movie was dive humanely and with keen, observant wit into the Valley’s least reputable industry while simultaneously turning his vivid characters into metaphors for everyone around here who’d ever felt looked down upon by those folks from the other side of the Hollywood Hills – or parts of the country that only saw punchlines in our sun-baked, sometimes admittedly silly lifestyle.

As if to reinforce the disrespected feeling that seethed and built through every frame of “Boogie Nights,” New Line Cinema first showed the movie commercially in New York on Oct. 10, 1997, and when it got to our coast seven days later, they didn’t book its opening weekend in a single Valley theater.

No matter, once it got up here. Anderson, whose father Ernie was a successful voice actor, had an instinctive understanding of striving artists, not-so-talented would-be artists, support players and staff, romantics brought by luck or circumstance down to reality . . . people who you’d encounter on Ventura Boulevard on any given day. He also knew in his bones that the Valley was L.A.’s, and the country’s, emblematic bedroom community, where the region’s families grow no matter how much emotional concrete separated them from the nurturing earth.

“The general search for family, the urge to latch onto anyone you can find who can give you love and attention and affection, that’s universal,” Anderson told me in ’97. “But it’s doubled in the film industry, and it’s tripled in the porn industry. You’re in circumstances that can be so demoralizing, so quickly, that you’re forced to reach out to people who know what you’re going through.”

Anderson’s merciless yet empathetic writing brought together a superb acting family the likes of which has rarely been constituted.

Only one castmember, Burt Reynolds, had been an A Lister at the time, and in his case not for a decade – and never again, after giving his finest performance as smutmaker with auteurist pretensions and porn paterfamilias Jack Horner. Cast because that Beverly Glen guy Warren Beatty gave Anderson the run-around for too long, Reynolds reportedly was the only actor who fought with the director while making “Boogie Nights” and hated the finished product. Yet his portrayal stands as the epitome of Studio City silver fox cool.

Mark Wahlberg, on the other hand, should have nothing but gratitude for his role in “Boogie Nights” (and for his friend Leonardo DiCaprio, who has expressed regret for turning down Anderson’s lead offer to make a little movie about a sinking ship instead). Previously, Wahlberg was primarily known, and dismissed, as Donnie’s rapping and underwear-modeling little brother Marky Mark. But then he so nailed it as Eddie Adams, a well-endowed Torrance teen who actually thought working as a busboy at a Reseda disco was worth the commute, and Jack turned into the adult film superstar called Dirk Diggler. “Boogie’s” display of Wahlberg’s own star power, and unknown ’til then acting range, launched his own superstar career. Forbes recently declared Donnie’s little brother the highest-paid actor of 2017.

Julianne Moore – who two years earlier headlined another Valley classic, Safe,” for the area’s other top auteur Todd Haynes – distinguished herself like never before as Jack’s lead actress and heartbroken, zonked-out den mother Amber Waves; Moore’s in three movies this season alone (including Haynes’ lovely “Wonderstruck”) and won an Oscar in 2015.

On a more meta level, “Boogie Nights” dramatized a discussion you’ll still hear in coffee houses and bars from the Burbank Media District to Kardashian-congested Calabasas, about how are technological and cultural changes affect the art in entertainment. Both the movie and most people who talk about this agree it’s mostly negative. But even though “Boogie Nights” is well aware it’s ludicrous to hear people whose talent is mainly in their genitals talk about creative integrity and enduring celebrity, it also knows how crucial such concerns are to not just the Hollywood crowd, but to the Beverly Hills-adjacent.

Just scratching the surface of “Boogie Nights’” eternal greatness here. But is it the greatest Valley movie of all time? Maybe. Ask me again in two years, on the 20th anniversary of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia.”

Bob Straus has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.

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